Motorola’s much-hyped commercial for the Xoom tablet debuted during the 2011 NFL Super Bowl. While we previously saw a tease of the ad, which takes stabs at Apple’s iPad, the full advertisement was finally seen in the early portion of the second quarter.

The Xoom commercial showed a 1984-like world where everyone is under the spell of a controlling faction that makes everyone think the same and act the same. But one lone rebel manages to break away from the pack, do his own thing, and get rewarded for it in multiple ways.

It cost Motorola millions of dollars to air the minute-long ad, and we wanted to gauge what people had to say. After a quick survey on Twitter, we found that people are typically in one of two camps: they loved the shot at Apple or hate that Motorola chose to focus so much on the comparison rather than taking a direct approach and show off what the Xoom can do.

What do you think? Here’s the advertisement shown during the Super Bowl and some of our favorite responses shared on Twitter. Feel free to leave a comment below.

Created by Anomaly New York, the ad entitled ?Empower the People? is set in an Orwellian, 1984-esque world where technology ? and people ? are limited by restrictive platforms. Enter Motorola XOOM – the tablet to create a better world – and a new day with optimism, openness, freedom and empowerment….
As the first tablet running Google?s new Android 3.0 Honeycomb operating system, the XOOM is powerful and fundamentally different than anything else on the market.

This is not the first time this concept was done. I shot a short film, “Do Not Disconnect” in 2009 with a girl breaking out of a world plugged into headphones. A world with no human interaction. Since we’re not expecting credit from Motorola, I’m asking people to please take a few minutes to watch how this idea was first done. Decide for yourself if you think this is too similar. It’s not an ad; it’s a fun, heartfelt short film. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmRsfnZJh0c Thank you!

While this is a great short film (I watched that you showed), I don't think it was oriented at marketing ploys, but more so how individuals have "tuned out, tuned in, tuned out" etc to whatever was the latest thing to hit their ears. However, in an office environment in which I live, I find more people who are supposed to be "collaborating" through an open environment plugging in the earphones and require more time to shake them loose of their distraction than should be afforded. Yes, it does seem a play on the 80's Apple commercial of breaking out of "Big Blue"; however, I think it is still as message to society in general. Cheers!

Great looking commercial and a nice shoot at Apple. It shows hows nearly the whole world is dominated by Apple produts but a few people do buy other products such as Android. Moto Xoom looks awesome<div style="display:block;margin:6px 0 0"><a class="a2a_dd" href="http://www.addtoany.com/share_save"><img src="http://static.addtoany.com/buttons/share_save_171_16.png&quot; width="171" height="16" border="0" alt="Share/Save/Bookmark">

Loved it!!! Shows how stupid people are to buy Apple products and become a bonded slave to their ideology. Think for yourself people! There are better products out there that remove the limitations imposed by Apple.

It's apropos that your statement mirrors what a company tried to do with people. The original Ad which put a company on the charts portrayed a group of mind-enslaved individuals that needed to break out. …and they did, into another group of people who were mind-enslaved to another master. I suppose what comes around, goes around. Long live the freedom of choice, even if we choose to believe we don't have it. Cheers.